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I’ve never seen a day like yesterday online. Yeah, Wikipedia being out got most of the focus, and a lot of that was jokes at the expense of people who were kind of terminally clueless. People will forget about it over time, or take away the wrong message (already, I heard a BBC commenter say, “So, this is a blow against intellectual property?”… no, just against the use of it as an excuse to stifle completely unrelated areas.) It’ll be easy to forget the feeling of watching history change in front of our eyes, as the day went on. So consider:

Until the internet spoke up, SOPA and PIPA were considered to be a sure thing, with overwhelming majorities in both houses. Even worse, they were considered to be sure to pass because nobody would even bother to learn what was in them.

According to SOPAstrike.org, over 75,000 sites, large and small, took part in the protest. It was more than that, really: that’s only the people who added their names to the list.

Over 7 million people signed Google’s petition. It’s still up, if you didn’t get to it yesterday.

Thousands of people showed up in person in New York for the NY Tech Meetup’s protest at their Senators’ offices.

Dozens of legislators announced their opposition to the two bills. Some of them were previously unaligned, but the list includes several who were previously in favor, even co-sponsors of the bills.

We — the internet, the meme fields, the digital wild west — did a thing. Don’t forget it. But above, don’t stop until it’s done:

ACTION: If you couldn’t get through to your congress members because their phone and fax lines were slammed and their websites went down, contact them now. Even if you did get through, contact them again.

In talking with non-geeks, I can’t help but be fascinated that the debate has somehow been framed in the public eye as “pro-piracy” vs. “anti-piracy.” Needless to say, that’s the frame that Murdoch is advocating, even as geeks are pushing for the “pro-internet” vs. “pro-censorship” frame. What’s especially intriguing to me is that the piracy conversation is getting convoluted even among politicos, revealing the ways in which piracy gets flattened to one concept.

Anyone who writes or distributes Virtual Private Network, proxy, privacy or anonymization software would be negatively affected. This includes organizations that are funded by the State Department to create circumvention software to help democratic activists get around oppressive regimes’ online censorship mechanisms. Ironically, PIPA and SOPA would not only institute the same practices as these regimes, but would essentially outlaw the tools used by activists to circumvent censorship in countries like Iran and China as well.

Though the battle is won, the war is not. SOPA could easily make a resurgence if it sculpts itself to whatever the White House’s unspecified specifications are, and PIPA could also pass, as even with recent changes to it (courts can’t force ISPs to block websites), it’s still harmful.

Take the truck, the boat, the helicopter, that we’ve sent you. Don’t wait for the time machine, because we’re never going to invent something that returns you to 1965 when copying was hard and you could treat the customer’s convenience with contempt.

Policies designed to protect industry players who are unwilling or unable to address unmet market needs are always bad policies. They retard the growth of new business models, and prop up inefficient companies. But in the end, they don’t even help the companies they try to protect. Because those companies are trying to preserve old business models and pricing power rather than trying to reach new customers, they ultimately cede the market not to pirates but to legitimate players who have more fully embraced the new opportunity.

Like this:

Like a lot of webheads, I’m deeply concerned by the proposed bills working their way through Congress right now. As a community and an industry, we must oppose SOPA (House) and PIPA (Senate).

This site and my main business site will go dark from 8:00 am to 8:00 pm (US Eastern time) on Wednesday January 18. Client beta sites, support, and the like will not be affected. If you own a website, consider doing the same; if you’re not in a position to go dark, please voice your opposition to SOPA/PIPA in other ways. My combined page views are nothing compared to the vast empire that is I Can Has Cheezburger, but the more sites are united against the proposed laws, the greater our impact.

If you’re not in the US, please speak up anyway. Yes, these are US laws, but they’re designed to hurt the internet outside US jurisdiction: needless to say, this is one of the really reprehensible things about these laws, but it’s not the only one.

A note from a member of the Google Webmaster team on doing downtime right. Honestly, I’m not inclined to stress a whole lot about the SEO implications of which error code I choose for a one-time 12-hour blackout. But for high-traffic sites, or if regularly go down for maintenance windows or the like, as they say, the more you know…

UPDATE 2: For hosted sites (WordPress.com, Blogspot, Tumblr, etc.)

http://pastebin.com/XhDhHp6q is a snippet that will work on most hosted blogs. Special hint for WordPress.com users with the 2011 theme: put this in one of the widgets in the footer, since the side widgets don’t appear on pages!

And a big announcement: WordPress.org is joining the protest along with big players like Wikipedia, Reddit, Mozilla, and (sorta) Google!

WordPress.com users now have an option in their settings to add a ribbon or black out their sites. (From what I can tell, they appear to be based on the Stop-SOPA Ribbon and SOPA Blackout plugins mentioned above.)